"It’s been well over a month since I blocked annotations (Hypothesis and Genius) on my websites. I’m a little taken aback that some folks are still muttering about it. Perhaps I need to restate a couple of things:

• You can still annotate my work. Just not on my websites.

• My work here and on Hack Education is openly licensed. As long as you follow that license – CC BY NC SA – you can copy and redistribute my articles without my permission.

• The CC license on my work also means you can post my articles in another file format or medium – that is, they needn’t stay in HTML. You can publish my articles as PDFs. You can hit “print.”

Jon Udell, who now works for Hypothesis and who I finally met face-to-face at NMC last week, has suggested the possibility of using an HTML meta tag to identify annotation preferences. Rather than simply blocking annotations as I’ve done with a bit of Javascript, his idea would allow an author to point to another URL where annotation can (or should, even) happen.

It makes sense, but I think I’m much less committed to having one canonical “place” for annotations than Hypothesis is. (I have quotations there because its annotations are overlays that appear to be in “place.”)

Udell recently announced that Hypothesis supports DOIs (digital object identifiers) so that a “robust connection between articles and annotations” can be maintained. That is to say, Hypothesis annotations of a PDF can be centralized, no matter where the article is hosted or whether it’s a local copy.

I’m not sure I care much about federated or centralized annotations – as a researcher or as an author. Actually, as an author, I do not care at all. Funnily enough, one of the accusations lobbed against me when I blocked annotations here was that I was attempting to exert some sort of “authorial control” over my work. Wrong. I was exerting control over my website.

We seem to have telescoped authorship and scholarship into the digital in ways that are remarkably unhelpful. People become “content,” and calls for easier, more “permission-less sharing” seem to encourage folks to make demands on writers online (even in their own personal spaces), thinking they’re simply querying texts."

"Design for Know-Nothings, Dilettantes, and Melancholy Interlopers – Translators, impresarios, believers, and the heartbroken—this is a talk about design outside of authorship and ownership, IP or copyright, and even outside of research and collaboration. When and where do ideas come to life? What counts as design? Sara talks about some of her own "not a real designer" work, but mostly she talks about the creative work of others: in marine biology, architecture, politics, education. Lots of nerdy history, folks."

"This self-contradiction happens many times, presumably the result of the poem being written collectively. It’s also possible a given pair of such lines represents the mental state of an individual who holds two opposing views at once. In any case, many times the work asks you, the reader, to hold two opposing views, which is unusual in a manifesto (less unusual in a poem).

The poem is angry and it is exhausted. It is angry at many things, some of them related to sexual assault, some of them related to how people enact their activism. It is exhausted by the same things. The poem is 3,712 words of free verse, an average of 14 words per line. 243 of those lines are tweetable and 28 are too long to tweet."

…

"The manifesto is author-less; it was written collectively. Its authors are identified only by geography:

…

So it’s impossible to know how many people were involved. At least 11, and since there are 271 lines to the poem and each line seems to represent an individual thought, then 271 is probably the upper potential limit of the collective. So: I’d estimate somewhere between 11 and 271 people wrote the poem. They all identify as feminists but that doesn’t specify anything about gender or anything else. I made a little chart of the number of people involved by country:"

…

"I think this poem is fascinating today but I think it will also be fascinating 85 years from now, to one or more people, after many of the things to which it refers— the reading series, the people and places — cease to exist. It will define something specific about this moment in history. I doubt that 85 years will eradicate the cultural need for feminism, activism, or poetry. So this poem will help people understand how things have changed, or not, in the year 2100. They will be able to compare it to things that came before and to things that followed and know something about how things change in general."

…

"There are some things about this poem.

First, that it was written collectively and internationally via the Internet. Before this poem when you told me about collectively generated digital creative activist work my first thoughts were of 4Chan and Gamergate — of memes, not poems. So this poem changed that for me, it broadened the scope of what anonymous collectives can do online.

The idea of unidentified individuals collaborating and creating things has been understood by many people as a dangerous, bad thing connected to harassment. But this poem is the product of people working collaboratively and anonymously to create art that they hope will have a positive social impact. It is also a public policy statement, from a group without a name (even Anonymous has a name). Maybe this “No Collective” has already ceased to exist."

********

I don’t know how to read this thing. I mean, I could read it from beginning to end. But I burned out on that. Instead I’ve been coming back to it over a couple of weeks, digging out the PDF, and thinking it through.

It’s pretty much without imagery and metaphor. It’s incantatory. It acknowledges a diversity of opinion on some things (Melville House) and refuses a diversity of opinion on others (the reality of sexual assault).

The fact that it was written collectively makes it unclear to me, at any point of the poem, whether I am reading something that was written by an individual and then glued together, or if each line was collaboratively edited. How was it edited by the Chicago Review? I wish I knew which tools were used to compose it, because that matters. Google docs? An email list with a single editor? Facebook chat? How could you find out? Who could you ask? The things that are stable (“No to rape”) are very stable; other things are completely unstable. This poem raises a million questions about what it means to read things and how the Internet is changing writing. There are many poetic manifestos in the world and I’m sure some of them were anonymously written but the thing I keep thinking about is how there are now a set of technologies — in the broadest sense, not just the Internet but technologies of self-organizing and collaboratively working — that enable the rapid creation of new things in reaction to events."

…

"I’ve half-followed the Alt-Lit scene for a while and have probably spent 20 years reading about “digital poetics,” and this is the very first time I went, well, there you go.

It seems that a lot of worlds are starting to collide. It also feels that anonymous international collectives of varying sizes and shapes, with radically different ideologies, will claim their voice in culture moving forward, ranging from 4Chan and Gamergate, which are very masculine entities, to this no collective, which is avowedly, fundamentally feminist. I expect people sharing other kinds of belief systems will start operating and creating as collectives, too."

"‘I Look to Theory Only When I Realize That Somebody Has Dedicated Their Entire Life to a Question I Have Only Fleetingly Considered’

A keynote lecture by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, whose writing has been described as ‘some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry’ (Publishers Weekly). Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry and founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb. In 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of MoMA."

Alex Klein and Mark Owens: Excursus was a two-year, four-part initiative at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia positioned at the intersection of art and design, programs and exhibitions, and the archive and the museum. It took the form of a rotating installation on the ICA mezzanine, a curated series of intimate events, and an online residency on the Excursus website, which also acted as a form of real-time documentation. Each of the four invited participants— Reference Library, East of Borneo, Ooga Booga, and Primary Information—work in a space between artistic domains that don’t always have a comfortable place within a traditional gallery setting, such as publication, distribution, archival research, and programming.

Alex was hired in 2011 as ICA’s newly-created program curator, and Excursus was a way to explore and activate the “discursive space” of the museum as it approached it’s 50th anniversary and to challenge the notion of how a program could function and how we might gauge its success. ICA is a non-collecting institution with a long history of ground-breaking exhibitions—Andy Warhol, Paul Thek, and Martin Kippenberger each had their first U.S. solo museum shows at ICA, for example—and thus ICA’s extensive archive is in a very real sense its collection. Each of the participants was thus invited to delve into the ICA archive and to make connections both with their own concerns and the exhibitions currently on view in the main galleries.

An “excursus” is a literary term describing a digression or supplement to a primary text, and the project was conceived very much in that spirit, with every element, from the installation to the programming, emerging from these conceptual and material connections. The aim was to provide a platform that could be responsive and flexible–both in terms of form and authorship–and that could could bridge the gap between extra-institutional and institutional activities while still maintaining a strong framework and a grounding in the physical space of the ICA.

EB: The project has a very strong design sensibility, from the participants selected, to the design of the space, to the design of the ephemera, and of course the catalogue. Was there a philosophy at work behind the design of the whole program?

AK & MO: Certain binaries seemed to anchor each season of the project: East Coast vs. West Coast, black-and-white vs. color, social vs. contemplative, etc. Although each iteration of the project revolved around a kind of kit of parts–a flexible space for discussion, a display system for the event broadsides, a set of flat file drawers to display archival material, an auratic object of some kind, and a projection in the lobby–each of the invited participants contributed a strong visual aesthetic that was linked to the thematic of each of their installations. Thus, the form of each installation, from the materials used to the seating and furniture, reflected a distinct sensibility that changed radically from project to project and sat apart from the rest of the museum identity and the exhibitions in the main galleries. For example, Reference Library’s Andy Beach used custom-designed furniture in unpainted wood in combination with Martino Gamper’s bright plastic Arnold Circus stools in shades of blue and a Wharton Esherick Hammer Handle Chair on loan from the Hedgerow Theater in nearby Rose Valley. This then gave way to East of Borneo‘s exploration of California arts pedagogy circa 1970 with seminar tables, vintage David Rowland 40/4 chairs in period colors, and an actual Metamorphokit table, designed by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan, shipped directly from the CalArts library. For her installation Ooga Booga’s Wendy Yao recreated the unmistakable look and feel of her two Los Angeles stores, complete with a hammock, bookshelves, and a custom table and benches designed by Manuel Raeder, which are now installed at her Mission Road space. Finally, Primary Information drew inspiration from ICA’s seminal 1975 Video Art exhibition with a more spare, conceptualist, black-and-white aesthetic, punctuated by Sarah Crowner’s dramatic Vidas Perfectas curtain (2011), originally produced for a Robert Ashley performance, which created a literal backdrop for the activities that ensued. In this way, the design of the projects themselves marked out a distinct physical space that was at once rich with material and metaphor, but also flexible and open."

An organisation born in Bristol, UK, Situations reimagines what public art can be and where and when it can take place. We like to think and reflect on what happens when the spark of an idea is lit. We test out new ways in which to share those ideas through new commissions, events, interviews, books and blogs – just like this, The New Rules of Public Art.

Sign-up here to receive a link to download your free ‘The New Rules of Public Art’ poster or scroll down to get hold of your very own rulebook. In the meantime enjoy, share and debate The Rules.

THE NEW RULES OF PUBLIC ART

Rule no. 01: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO LOOK LIKE PUBLIC ART.

The days of bronze heroes and roundabout baubles are numbered. Public art can take any form or mode of encounter – from a floating Arctic island to a boat oven – be prepared to be surprised, delighted, even unnerved.

[Futurefarmers, Flatbread Society, Oslo, 2013. Photo: Max McClure]

Rule no. 02: IT’S NOT FOREVER.

From the here-today-gone tomorrow of a “one day sculpture” to the growth of a future library over 100 years, artists are shaking up the life expectancy of public artworks. Places don’t remain still and unchanged, so why should public art?

[BC System, New Works Forever, Bristol, 2013. Photo: Georgina Bolton]

Rule no. 03: CREATE SPACE FOR THE UNPLANNED.

Commissioning public art is not a simple design-and-build-process. Artworks arrive through a series of accidents, failures and experiments. Moments of uncertainty and rethinking are the points at which the artwork comes into focus. Let responses to the artwork unfold over time and be open to the potential for unforeseen things to happen.

Rule no. 04: DON’T MAKE IT FOR A COMMUNITY. CREATE A COMMUNITY.

Be wary of predefining an audience. Community is rarely born out of geography, but rather out of common purpose – whether that be a Flatbread Society of farmers, bakers and activists building a bakehouse or 23,000 citizens across 135 countries writing a constitution for a new nation. As Brian Eno once said, “sometimes the strongest single importance of a work of art is the celebration of some kind of temporary community.”

[Alex Hartley, Nowhereisland, Mevagissey, 2012. Photo: Max McClure]

Rule no. 05: WITHDRAW FROM THE CULTURAL ARMS RACE.

Towns and cities across the world are locked into a one-size fits all style of public art. In a culture of globalized brands and clone towns, we hanker after authentic, distinctive places. If we are place-making, then let’s make unusual places.

Rule no. 06: DEMAND MORE THAN FIREWORKS.

Believe in the quiet, unexpected encounter as much as the magic of the mass spectacle. It’s often in the silence of a solitary moment, or in a shared moment of recognition, rather than the exhilaration of whizzes and bangs, that transformation occurs.

We need smart urban design, uplifting street lighting and landmark buildings, but public art can do so much more than decorate. Interruptions to our surroundings or everyday activities can open our eyes to new possibilities beyond artistic embellishment.

Public art is of the people and made with the people, but not always by the people. Artists are skilled creative thinkers as well as makers. They are the charismatic agents who arrive with curious ideas – a black pavilion could be barnraised in a Bristol park, a graveyard could be built to commemorate the Enrons and West India Companies of our fallen economy, the sounds of a church organ might bleed out across the city through a mobile app. Trust the artist’s judgment, follow their lead and invest in their process.

Rule no. 09: WELCOME OUTSIDERS.

Outsiders challenge our assumptions about what we believe to be true of a place. Embrace the opportunity to see through an outsider’s eyes.

Is it sculpture? Is it visual art? Is it performance? Who cares! There are more important questions to ask. Does it move you? Does it shake up your perceptions of the world around you, or your backyard? Do you want to tell someone else about it? Does it make you curious to see more?

Rule no. 11: SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF.

Art gives us the chance to imagine alternative ways of living, to disappear down rabbit holes, to live for a moment in a different world. Local specifics might have been the stepping off point – but public art is not a history lesson. Be prepared that it might not always tell the truth.

[Tony White, Missorts, Bristol, 2012. Photo: Max McClure]

Rule no. 12: GET LOST.

Public art is neither a destination nor a way-finder. Artists encourage us to follow them down unexpected paths as a work unfolds. Surrender the guidebook, get off the art trail, enter the labyrinth and lose yourself in unfamiliar territory.

Situations opens up the potential for artists to make extraordinary ideas happen in unusual and surprising places, through which audiences and participants are encouraged to explore new horizons.

We choose to work with artists who want to connect directly with people’s lives, creating space for them to take risks, to test limits and cross boundaries. Since 2002, artists have led us and thousands of others into unchartered territories, brought us together to build, bake, grow and marvel, transformed familiar surroundings, provoked us to ask ourselves challenging questions and told us tall tales of the future.

"Degrading authorship is something the web already does spectacularly well. Work gets chopped and sliced and repurposed. That last animated GIF you saw — do you know who made it? Probably not. That infonugget you saw on Gawker or The Atlantic — did it start there? Probably not. Sites like Buzzfeed are built largely on reshuffling the Internet, rearranging work into streams and slideshows.

It’s been a while since auteur theory made sense as an explanation of the web. And you know what? We’re better for it. In a world of functionally infinite content, relying on authorship doesn’t scale. We need people to mash things up, to point things out, to sample, to remix."

" If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all."

"Finding a way to acknowledge content curation and information discovery (or, better, the new term we invent for these fluffy placeholders) as a form of creative labor, and to codify this acknowledgement, is the next frontier in how we think about “intellectual property” in the information age."

"Ultimately, I see Twitter neither as a medium of broadcast, the way text is, nor as one of conversation, the way speech is, but rather as a medium of conversational direction and a discovery platform for the text and conversations that matter."

Chaplin [unmixed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLci5DoZqHU ]: "Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all."

Koolhaas: "Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors..."

A TXT file that contains the information about the different people who have contributed to the web building.

Why a TXT?
It's simple and fast to create.

Because it is not intrusive with the code. The owners of the sites are usually reluctant to let the creators of their sites to sign them, claiming that it reduces their effiency. This way, you can prove your authorship (not property) in an extern, fast, easy and accessible way."

"Over the last 20 years...cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create & distribute things like newsletters, videos, or bad-ass tunes about "ugly." Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! & when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to...throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more & more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you."

"For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.

The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations—lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about “ugly.”

Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you.

As people start learning and experimenting with these languages of authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.
In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your Myspace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. Over time as consumer-created media engulfs the other kind, it's possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability." ]